Crucial MX500 SSD review: start of a price war?

New SATA SSDs from Crucial are fast and affordable!

By Tomas HochstenbachFriday 30 March 2018 04:59

Introduction

As if they had matched it up, Samsung and Crucial will both present new series of SATA SSDs this month. It's no secret that Samsung has been working on a 860 EVO and 860 Pro. The Crucial MX500 recently arrived in the Hardware.Info test lab and in this article you can read all about it.

The most important component of the recipe used by Crucial for the MX500 is a new generation of 3D NAND, which, in the case of Crucial, of course comes from the factories of parent company Micron. This new flash memory consists of 64 layers, whereas the MX300 still used 32-layer NAND. As more layers of memory cells are stacked, the density increases, resulting in lower production costs and more storage capacity on the same surface area.

For the MX500, Crucial is also using a Silicon Motion ssd controller, the SM2258, for the first time. Until now we have always encountered controllers from Marvell in the MX-ssd's, but the SM2258 is not unknown either - we have already encountered it in Plextor and Transcend's ssds, for example. This sata600 controller can control nand-chips via four channels and supports drama cache and hardware encryption. Both of them are found in the MX500.

The most interesting thing about the Crucial MX500-ssd's is perhaps pricing. It is certainly aggressive, with which Crucial seems to be starting a price war. For this review, we tested the 500GB and 1TB models, which you can obtain for an average of 129 pounds and 235 pounds. Just before publication, however, the manufacturer informed us that the MX500 500GB will soon drop in price to about 115 pounds, or 23 pence per GB. This brings us back to the level before the price increases.